1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of time-management for road travelers and vehicles, and more particularly, to determining departure times to allow for on-time arrivals at particular locations based on evaluation of historic, present, and predicted road conditions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent studies have found that road travelers can spend almost 50% of their commute time ‘stuck’ in traffic, that is, not making significant progress on traversing a total distance to their final destination. This unfortunate phenomenon is sometimes referred to as ‘grid lock.’ Grid lock is often exacerbated, if not caused by, road construction, high traffic volume related to ‘rush hour,’ or otherwise resulting from special events such as concerts and holiday traffic or, as is most often the case, accidents on a roadway resulting in road or lane closures.
Further studies have demonstrated that daily commuters account for over 75% of all car trips. With increasing urban-sprawl, most road travelers are commuters with increasingly significant distances to travel. Combined with the fact that almost 90% of daily commuters in the United States, for example, use private vehicles and therein represent millions of people wanting to move at the same time, road systems in the United States and around the world simply do not have the capacity to handle peak loads of traffic. Traffic congestion has become, unfortunately, a way of life.
Road travelers are, as a result, often vulnerable when making travel plans in that they do not know what to expect in terms of traffic conditions or commute time on any given day. Poor and inconsistent traffic information combined with the road traveler's general inability to process multiple feeds of incoming real time and historical data as it relates to weather, incident reports, time of year, construction road closures, and special events further complicate these problems.
Road travelers are reduced to making inaccurate predictions as to required travel time necessary to traverse from a point of departure to a desired point of arrival. Furthermore, road travelers, due in part to constantly changing weather and traffic conditions, are often unaware that more optimal travel routes might exist both prior to departure and while en route to the desired point of arrival.
Present systems inform the road traveler of actual conditions on a variety of routes, but leave determination of an ultimate travel route and necessary departure time to the road traveler, which inevitably results in the aforementioned inaccurate predictions.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,594,576 to Fan et al. provides a traffic data compilation computer that determines present traffic conditions and a fastest route to a particular location under the aforementioned traffic conditions. Fan et al. also provides estimated travel time based on current traffic conditions. Fan et al. fails, however, to provide a necessary departure time to the road traveler so that they may achieve an on-time arrival. Fan et al. also fails to consider historical traffic data in that present conditions may allow for a given travel time but fails to predict a change in that travel time due to a known forthcoming event such as rush hour or a concert. Furthermore, Fan et al. requires the presence of a collection of data from mobile units—vehicles. Absent large scale cooperation of road travelers to equip their vehicles with such data collection equipment, the data collection network of Fan et al. might also produce inaccurate or, at least, incomplete information.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,236,933 to Lang is also representative of the lack of a means to inform road travelers of both evolving road conditions, travel routes, and the necessary departure time on any one of those routes in order to achieve on-time arrival. Lang, too, is dependent upon widespread installation of monitoring electronic devices in each road traveler's vehicle.
There is the need for a system that aggregates multiple sources of traffic data and interprets that traffic data to express it as a predictive road speed and not a static route devoid of considerations of constantly evolving traffic conditions. By overlaying predictive road speeds with a road traveler's starting locating, destination, desired arrival time and other optional attributes, a road traveler is offered a much needed system that determines an optimal route and recommended departure time. Such a system would then deliver the information via a desired message delivery method. Such a system should also remain sensitive of privacy concerns of road travelers in that the presence of a monitoring device might be considered invasive and otherwise outweighs any benefits it might offer in providing predictive road speed.